Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 vanished over the Indian Ocean in March 2014, along with all 238 people on board.
Now, 5 years later, the mystery may finally be explained after The Atlantic published an extensive report detailing the probable turn of events that fateful night.
Most chilling was the discovery that first pilot Zaharie Ahmad Shah, 53, had practised a similar route on his flight simulator at home, as though plotting the plane’s fatal trajectory.
MH370 pilot Zaharie had a hobby of practising flight routes on his home simulator and sharing it on social media.
What Malaysian police didn’t look into, however, was a single route on the simulator that eerily matched the path MH370 took right before it disappeared.
And what set it apart from the others is that the plane never landed after takeoff.
Zaharie reportedly let the plane surge forward multiple times while releasing fuel as needed until it ran dry.
The flight path was too similar for the practice run to be a mere coincidence, pointing at a high chance that Zaharie had planned the tragedy well in advance.
According to a long-time friend and fellow pilot, Zaharie had a string of affairs with several flight attendants, which he said was normal in their line of work.
But the latter’s wife had found out about it, leading to fissures in their relationship.
His wife arranged for counselling sessions to rescue their marriage, but Zaharie skipped them all, falling into an apparent depression.
He became distant and distracted, unlike his usual self. It’s not impossible that his emotional state could have influenced his actions.
Just after 1am that night, Zaharie reported that the plane had reached an altitude of 35,000 feet, when the usual protocol was to check in after leaving an altitude.
A few minutes later, he repeated the message after they had left Malaysia behind and were approaching Vietnam.
When instructed to contact Ho Chi Minh’s air traffic control, Zaharie’s reply was an incomplete, “Good night. Malaysian three-seven-zero.”
He failed to include the frequency relayed to him, in the final message sent from the doomed flight.
37 seconds later, the plane vanished from the radar.
The radars allegedly couldn’t detect the plane because the internal controls had been switched off, presumably by Zaharie.
The sharp turn it made later was apparently so precise that only a person, supposedly also Zaharie, could have done it.
It was during this maneuver that the plane accelerated way beyond its limit, throwing the passengers back against their seats.
The abrupt ascent would have released pressure from inside the plane, depriving passengers of oxygen, and killing them instantly.
By then, the emergency masks would be pointless, as the passengers would have lost consciousness, as if they died in their sleep.
Despite having access to the flight simulator record found by the FBI, Malaysian investigators refused to consider it seriously, allegedly brushing it aside “as merely one of several hundred that the simulator had recorded.”
Their unwillingness to take every detail into account weighs on their earlier failure to follow protocol and report the disappearance immediately, which led to search operations by Australia launched in completely wrong areas.
Kuala Lumpur’s air traffic control only notified the Aeronautical Rescue Coordination Centre over an hour after the plane disappeared, and the emergency response didn’t start until 4 hours after that.
These, as pointed out by The Atlantic, coupled with how the Malaysian government painted Zaharie as being mentally healthy and happy, shielded him from investigations.
Despite all the above analyses, no theory can be confirmed until the wreckage is found.
Even then, it will require full disclosure and transparency from the Malaysian authorities to get the entire truth behind what had happened.
For now, the conclusions derived from The Atlantic’s report give us the best possible explanation as to how MH370 mysteriously disappeared.
Featured image from Planespotters.net and Facebook.
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